by DailyDigest

Economy

As we look forward – with some trepidation – to how events will unfold in 2019, we have invited some friends of the show into the studio to discuss what shocked them in 2018 and what they see playing out this year.

Trump administration officials say the asylum process is being exploited by immigrants who are counting on passing the initial credible-fear screening and being released into the country. Only about 9% of all people who initially claim asylum are granted it, and tens of thousands of families from Central America are coming to the US every month.

“It was scientifically proven that communism is the only social-economic system providing the masses with justice and equality – 100% of scientists agree on this. The topic is not up for debate!”, so proclaimed my professor during one of his lectures on the subject ‘scientific communism’, while the country of Czechoslovakia was still under communist control. I was reminded of his blustery pronouncement the first time I encountered the spurious claim that “a consensus of 97% of scientists agree global warming is man-made.” Most people don’t question scientific statements because they think they are facts. They do not understand that scientific statements must always be challenged, because Science is not about ‘consensus’; ideology is.

Minority Whip Steve Scalise likely knows how tax brackets work and is just using this as a shorthand to attack Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal. But he’s playing on a broader misunderstanding of tax brackets among Americans. Every tax season, I come across an astounding number of people who believe that you find your “tax bracket” and then pay that rate on all your income. They’ll say things like, “I got a raise, but it bumped me into the next bracket, so I paid more in taxes.”

Her research incorporated data from 25 different U.S. metropolitan areas, including Boston. The differences among them are illuminating, she says. “Boston is not as bad in terms of overall housing insecurity, because this index looks at more than just affordability—which we know is a problem here. For example, only 16 percent of Boston/Cambridge renter households had three or more indicators of housing insecurity, compared to 33 percent of renter households in Miami, the city that showed the worst levels of renter insecurity.”

Indeed, the oil market is already tightening up relative to the outlook in December when prices dropped to 18-month lows. Saudi Arabia already slashed output by 400,000 bpd in December compared to a month earlier, and news that they will essentially cut another 400,000 bpd in January is raising expectations of a tighter market.

The summer of 2018 was the last on the cliff edge for Happisburgh’s static caravan site, which has now been forced to move inland. A particularly bad winter of storms saw the metal and aluminium holiday homes there inch further and further to the edge of the cliff; rows of dwellings have periodically fallen into the sea for years. These caravans have now been moved next to the village school. Another caravan nearby had been standing for 13 years, but in December 2013, after a huge tidal surge, the foundations were ripped from beneath it and it suddenly slipped down the cliff.

What’s causing the dramatic drop-off is somewhat of a mystery. Experts believe the decline is spurred by a confluence of unfortunate factors, including late rainy-season storms across California last March, the effects of the state’s yearslong drought and the seemingly relentless onslaught of wildfires that have burned acres upon acres of habitat and at times choked the air with toxic smoke.

Gold & Silver

Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to [email protected]. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the “3 Es.”

Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones in the United States.
The bounty hunter sent the number to his own contact, who would track the phone. The contact responded with a screenshot of Google Maps, containing a blue circle indicating the phone’s current location, approximate to a few hundred metres.
Queens, New York. More specifically, the screenshot showed a location in a particular neighborhood—just a couple of blocks from where the target was. The hunter had found the phone

The hacker group CCC reported several years ago at a conference in Germany that the tools needed to ping a cell phone WITHOUT THE OWNERS AWARENESS were available. A phone could be pinged secretly and its GPS coordinents read. This GPS information is detailed enough to tell if two people (or at least their phones) are sleeping in the same or separate rooms of a house and if the phone is on the first or second floor.

Leave your phone at home

Some of the links...

in that article were also quite enlightening, IMO:

Microbilt buys access to location data from an aggregator called Zumigo and then sells it to a dizzying number of sectors, including landlords to scope out potential renters; motor vehicle salesmen, and others who are conducting credit checks. Armed with just a phone number, Microbilt’s “Mobile Device Verify” product can return a target’s full name and address, geolocate a phone in an individual instance, or operate as a continuous tracking service.

Rubino

Financial writer John Rubino says no matter what country, the global debt has exploded to record highs, and it’s going to go even higher in the coming years. Rubino contends, “Government debt is going to soar going forward no matter what. Whether we have three more years of growth or a recession next year, we are going to see massive new deficits and massive increases in government debt all over the world. This is coming at a time when we have already hit record levels of debt and blown right through previous record levels. The last crisis, that almost ended the global financial system, was debt driven. The next one is going to be that much, much more serious because we basically doubled the amount of debt that’s out there since 2005 and 2006.”
On the political front, Rubino says, “The idea that things get more extreme from here is not that out of the ordinary and not that hard to believe. We are not just going to see gridlock here in the U.S., we are going to see chaos. That means of the things that should be gotten done, very few of them will be. . . . Political chaos is good for precious metals . . . both metals are way undervalued.”
Few would disagree, that at some point, the financial system is going to explode. Rubino says, “Let’s look at what happens when this finally blows up. The pressure is going to be on currencies when the financial system starts to spin out of control next time. In other words, people are going to see the amount of debt we are taking on, see the amount of currency we are creating to service all this debt, and will wonder what that does to the value of the currencies that are being aggressively created. They will lose faith in those currencies. What is unique about this time, countries have screwed up their currencies since the beginning of time . . . but this time around, they are all doing it. Every major country in the world has a printing press, which is to say an unlimited credit card. They are maxing out that credit card . . . and they are doing it simultaneously.”
In closing Rubino says, “All we have left is to wipe the slate clean and say, you know what, this thing did not work. It’s a 60 year experiment that turned out to have a fatal flaw, which is you can’t hand a printing press to a government.”